Content Management is an infrastructure to manage the full spectrum of digital information. Large collections of scanned images, facsimiles, electronic office documents, XML and HTML files, computer output, audio, video, multimedia, and virtual reality content can be stored and accessed through the content management system. The content management system integrates content with line of business, customer service, ERP, digital asset management, distance learning, Web content management or other applications to accelerate benefits across the enterprise.
In one embodiment the content manager product may be visualized as a triangle, its three vertices being the client, a library server and an object server (resource manager). The client is the user's interface which gives the user the capability of storing, searching for, and, marking-up documents (or to use the more general term, objects). The library server is the equivalent of a card catalog which holds information about the objects, including their location. The object server (OS), also referred to herein as the resource manager (RM) is where either the actual object or a pointer to the actual object is stored.
The core Library Server logic (except for system utilities and housekeeping tasks) is packaged as a set of relational data base (RDB) stored procedures (SPs) containing embedded SQL statements. Each stored procedure (SP) is precompiled and runs on a relational database (RDB) server. Thus each Library Server (LS) process is merely a relational database (RDB) server process. The interface to a Library Server is SQL, through which either stored procedures (SPs) can be called or SQL SELECT statements (including cursor support) can be executed. Remote access to Library Server is via a relational database (RDB) client.
The Resource Managers (RMs) may support different/multiple access protocols. The resource manager (RM)—object server (OS) supports the HTTP protocol.
The basic information entities managed by the Library Server are “items.” “Items” as used herein come in two types, simple items and resource items. Resource items can have content associated with them that is stored in one or more Resource Managers. Resource items point to their content via Resource URL-RELATED DATA. One attribute of “items” is their version. Versioning is managed by the library server on individual items. Therefore a resource manager handles different versions of a resource as a different resource.
The library server (LS) and object server (OS) (resource manager (RM)) are separate processes, often running on different machines. In operation, clients first contact the library server (LS) to create/update an index for an object, and to determine where the object is to be stored/replaced. The client then sends a request to the object server (OS) to store/replace the object. It is possible that backing-out updates to one does not mean a successful back-out of updates to the other, and one problem encountered in content management is maintaining consistency between the library server and the resource manager. Maintaining consistency requires linking object metadata stored in the library server to objects stored in a resource manager. When storing or updating objects, problems may arise which cause the library server's catalog to be out of synch with the object server's objects. A method is needed to recover from an out-of-synch condition, for example, to identify when abends have occurred which result in out-of-synch conditions, and then remedy the situation by manually rolling back updates when necessary. An abend may occur after an object has been stored, but before library server updates are committed.